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COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS
Enrico Fermi at the controls of the synchrocyclotron particle accelerator at the University of Chicago, Illinois, in the 1950s.
P H YS ICS
Fallible pontiff of physics
Graham Farmelo assesses a biography of star theorist-experimentalist Enrico Fermi.
T
he megalomaniac physicist Edward
Teller “was always certain that he was
smarter than all his colleagues on the
Manhattan Project, except one”, a younger
colleague of his (Robert Sachs) told me in
1993. That exception was Enrico Fermi, “the
nearest we physicists had to a Pope”.
Fermi’s infallibility is one of the prominent
themes of The Pope of Physics, the first popular cradle-to-grave biography in English of
the most famous Italian scientific investigator
since Galileo Galilei. The authors are married:
Bettina Hoerlin, formerly a health executive,
and Gino Segrè, a nephew of one of Fermi’s
most distinguished colleagues, Emilio Segrè.
They each met their subject independently,
and plainly found his career an inspiration.
Fermi’s many contributions to nuclear
science and technology — such as the creation of the first nuclear reactor — have been
recounted ad nauseam, so he might not seem
the most promising candidate for a biography. Segrè and Hoerlin, however, seek a new
perspective. They quickly hit their stride with
a lucid account of how
Fermi was born in
1901 to a middle-class
family in Rome and
became one of the very
few physicists to be in
the front rank in both
theory and experiment. The authors
engagingly describe The Pope of
how Fermi taught him- Physics: Enrico
self basic mathematics Fermi and the
and physics to a high Birth of the Atomic
standard by the time Age
GINO SEGRÈ AND
he was 17. Blessed with BETTINA HOERLIN
a prodigious ability to Henry Holt: 2016.
identify the essence
of every physics problem, he matured as a
researcher in the 1920s, at just the right time
to make his mark on two open frontiers:
nuclear science and quantum theory.
Fermi was often quicker than more formal
thinkers to apply abstract ideas to improve the
understanding of nature. In 1926 he became
.
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the first to use quantum theory to study large
aggregations of electrons, one of a class of
subatomic particles later called fermions,
and he later set out the first quantum field
theory of radioactive β decay. Yet his forte
was experimental physics, as he demonstrated
at the Sapienza University of Rome, which
appointed him a professor at the age of 24.
He made the Italian capital one of the world’s
most productive centres of modern physics.
Fermi and his talented colleagues found
that slow neutrons are remarkably effective
at inducing radioactivity in some heavy
chemical elements. That won him the physics Nobel in 1938. However, when Fermi
and his group studied the products of some
of the nuclear reactions that they induced,
their interpretations were sometimes wrong,
as he later acknowledged. To be fair, the great
radiochemist Otto Hahn and his group in
Berlin made the same mistake at about the
same time, before they recognized that
uranium nuclei undergo the process later
called fission.
BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT
The authors describe movingly how the
rise of Fascism in Italy led the Fermi family to emigrate to the United States. Fermi
arrived in New York City on 2 January 1939,
and soon took up a post at Columbia University. Although some US officials were wary
of putting foreigners in leading positions in
secret projects, Fermi was indisputably the
best person to lead the development and construction of the first nuclear reactor, CP-1,
which began operation on 2 December 1942:
a crucial stage in the development of nuclear
weapons. Robert Oppenheimer invited him
to join the Manhattan Project and created a
unit named after him. ‘F division’ dealt with
especially tough problems in experimental
and theoretical nuclear physics.
The biography sometimes has a hagio­
graphic whiff. Segrè and Hoerlin agree with
the consensus that he was largely apolitical and was “a scientist pure and simple”, as
his Hungarian colleague Leo Szilard once
described him. I suspect that the truth is
deeper, although it will probably remain
hidden. The authors tiptoe around some of
his less endearing characteristics, such as
his ability as a father. Fermi’s daughter told
me in 1992 that he was “always a distant figure”, and that 40 years earlier her father had
approached her out of the blue one day, suggesting that they get know each other better by doing a few experiments around the
house on the then-new material Silly Putty.
He did not repeat this initiative, which did
little to improve their relationship.
In my view, Segrè and Hoerlin underplay
Fermi’s considerable influence on young
physicists after the Second World War.
It would have been revealing to read, for
example, more from the great theoreticians
Murray Gell-Mann and Chen-Ning Yang,
who worked closely with him. Likewise, it
would have been rewarding to have heard
more about Fermi’s ideas on the origin of
cosmic rays and his thinking about the
future of subatomic-particle accelerators.
In January 1954, he gave a far-sighted lecture in which he envisaged the possibility
of building an ultrahigh particle accelerator
that girdled the entire planet by 1994.
Ten months later, he was dead. Lying in
his hospital bed the day after he had learnt
that he had terminal stomach cancer, he told
the astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar: “For a man past 50, nothing
essentially new can happen.” Had he lived
two decades longer, that would not have
been true. Physicists were soon to make
discoveries that fundamentally altered
their understanding of nature — another
reminder that Fermi’s foresight was, like
that of all putative scientific popes, fallible. ■
Graham Farmelo is a by-fellow at Churchill
College in Cambridge, UK.
e-mail: [email protected]
Books in brief
Welcome to the Universe: An Astrophysical Tour
Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss and J. Richard Gott
Princeton University Press (2016)
As citizens of the cosmos, we are duty bound to explore it. So opine
astrophysicists Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael Strauss and Richard
Gott, guides on this bracing expedition through dusty galactic
hinterlands and the vast theoretical vistas of Albert Einstein’s work.
Each is a master at untangling the abstruse through metaphor: Tyson
crams 100 million elephants into a thimble to illustrate neutron-star
density, and Gott recounts John Archibald Wheeler demonstrating
entropy by mixing tea and water and throwing it into a ‘black hole’.
The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
Tim Wu Knopf (2016)
Media scholar Tim Wu plunges into the noisome history of
“attention harvesting” — the commodification of human attention
by industry and government. It began, Wu reveals, with the
juxtaposition of advertisements and lurid news in 1830s gutter
journalism, and persisted in the engineered demands of “scientific
advertising”, the efforts of propagandist Edward Bernays (who
persuaded women to smoke) and the infiltration of fast-food ads
into US schools. To evade this induced narcosis and reclaim lived
experience, Wu argues, we must wean ourselves off the digital.
The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
Amitav Ghosh University of Chicago Press (2016)
Resistance to the grim realities of climate change is so widespread
that the crisis barely figures in literary fiction, notes writer
Amitav Ghosh. Branding our era of denial and inertia the Great
Derangement, Ghosh looks in turn at literature, history and politics
to examine this failure, noting that extreme events such as 2012’s
Hurricane Sandy are so freakish that they seem inexpressible. The
solution, he argues, lies in collective action as well as scientific and
governmental involvement — and in a resurgence in our imaginative
capacity to envision human existence anew.
Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer
Peter P. Marra and Chris Santella Princeton University Press (2016)
Among the hundreds of millions of domestic cats, many range
freely. That group is effectively a death squad for songbirds,
killing an estimated 4 billion US avifauna a year; globally, island
cats drive 14% of vertebrate extinctions. This deeply researched
overview by conservation scientist Peter Marra and writer Chris
Santella interlaces discussions of feline domestication and avian
conservation with the science of decline and of feline spillover
diseases. It culminates with a stark choice: control free-ranging cats
or witness the ongoing erosion of affected ecosystems.
Assassin of Youth: A Kaleidoscopic History of Harry J. Anslinger’s
War on Drugs
Alexandra Chasin University of Chicago Press (2016)
Harry Anslinger helmed the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics from
1930 to 1962, shaping US drug policy through what Alexandra
Chasin calls “an elaborately disastrous set of policies and laws”. In
this idiosyncratic chronicle, Chasin paces the trail from temperance
to today, when nearly half the inmates of US jails are incarcerated
for drug offences. A sorry tale of how one man’s racial prejudice and
predilection for prohibition led to a colossal policy failure. Barbara Kiser
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